[@OKau] How can we fund important Open Source projects?

Tue Nov 24 20:30:48 UTC 2015

Thanks Craig,

While what I've done is valuable it is not always the case that people want to know the truth that something reveals. Over time I came to realise that just because I wanted to know the truth about what was going on with top-down government spending it didn't mean that other people were going to embrace it if the data did not sit comfortably within the narratives they were getting from elsewhere. Had the site got into the education system/unis people would be able to use it to form their own conclusions but I don't have the kind of business experience to make those kinds of things happen.

So I moved on to giving people information about their specific location- thinking this would be of more interest to people given this info is not available anywhere else as this has never been done before. I don't know if you recall when we met at a startup breakfast meet in Canberra right back after I had first created BudgetAus and as we sat round the table the idea came up of giving people funding by electorate. I don't think either of us at that time thought that was likely to happen. 3 years on this is what I've created at https://openaus.net.au searchable by postcode, LGA, fed electorate etc but I've had almost no interest in it. I find this lack of interest a bit odd.

I am scratching my head about that. I've done an enormous amount of work constructing things that have never been done before with data that I have to say is extremely difficult to work with. Perhaps I'm just the wrong person to have done something like this.

Perhaps I can sell to someone better placed to turn it into a going concern. I don't think I have those particular skills & contacts and without them the skill & work completed is potentially going to waste. Any ideas?

OpenAus
Testimonials" I’ve worked with Rosie Williams on budget data transparency since November 2013. Rosie has developed her OpenAus data project into the best government ...
Read more...<https://openaus.net.au/>

Rosie Williams BA (Sociology)
________________________________________
 NoFibs.com.au<http://nofibs.com.au> - Open Data Reporter | OpenAus<https://openaus.net.au> - Founder and Developer

________________________________
From: okfn-au <okfn-au-bounces at lists.okfn.org> on behalf of Craig Thomler <craig.thomler at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 24 November 2015 4:36 PM
To: Open Knowledge discussion list for Australia.
Subject: Re: [@OKau] How can we fund important Open Source projects?

Hi Rosie,

You should also think about who your customer is.

Yes the public (citizens) are technically the audience for governance transparency services, but citizens don't pay for these services, they expect them to be baked into the service offer from government.

Generally citizens in Australia don't experience pain as a result of lack of governance transparency, so they don't see the value in expending money or time to alleviate it.

You may find customers amongst businesses who see data as a route to profits, but again this is a limited market with quite specific needs, so they're only interested in a subset of the data and very specific services which don't always serve a transparency objective.

You might find a few customers amongst NGOs focused on government transparency - however these groups are weak and diffuse in Australia as there's no real pain (again) from failures to be transparent, and they are very restricted in what they can afford to pay.

Finally there's government's themselves, who often have the most to gain from transparency initiatives due to the internal return and the perceptual value externally. They have money and interest, but difficult purchase processes to navigate and are unreliable payers (as many in the grant space recognise).

Ultimately if you're seeking to commercialize open data you need to look at where there's pain points in the market that people will pay to alleviate.

There are opportunities (such as transport data), these are limited but could fund your broader work.

You could also consider offering your services to the open data team in NSW government or the DTO - your experience using open data is valuable and something that people on the collection/release side don't always have.

Cheers,

Craig

On Tuesday, 24 November 2015, Rosie Williams <BudgetAus at hotmail.com<mailto:BudgetAus at hotmail.com>> wrote:

Hi Steven

I certainly don't expect Paul to answer on behalf of loads of other people but he was the one who specified public interest and use as the criteria for decision making wrt OKFN projects so I didn't think asking him if that info was available publicly was a tough question to answer.

I suspect that if the answer to the question I asked about decision making & data used it is not common knowledge among OKI staff or anyone else reading this thread then it is not readily available and there'd be little point asking for it elsewhere.

As for how to answer your original question about financial sustainability you might be right that more people would contribute on the other list. I'm just following up a thread you started here. I grant you that my particular questions may get replies from more people elsewhere so thankyou for your suggestions in that regard.

I was involved in a similar discussion months ago on the Influence Mappers Google group to which the founder of mySociety contributed his opinions on sustainability based on his experiences https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/influencemapping/_ecGe9UM_PM/GLUE-PGyBAAJ

[http://www.google.com/images/icons/product/groups-128.png]<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/influencemapping/_ecGe9UM_PM/GLUE-PGyBAAJ>

Re: [Influence Mappers Group] Re: Introduce yourself
Posted by Tom Steinberg, Aug 16, 2015 3:20 AM
Read more...<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/influencemapping/_ecGe9UM_PM/GLUE-PGyBAAJ>

I've begun to suspect Tom is right and that having an established audience you can reach at least gives you the personal momentum required to continue whereas when there is no one depending on your work and willing to pay for it, it is pretty hard to justify even to yourself that you are meeting a need. If you can get sizeable donors where people in the street are not asked to pay their own $$ for it, then that is one audience but the audience is not the general public but the donors. Grants may be based on the number of users but it there is a healthy user base it is difficult to understand why this is not a source of income instead of grants, why there is a disjuncture between who is seen to be using a project and who is paying for it (at least in rich countries).

That's why I'm interested in who pays for transparency projects that are begun in the name of the citizen because it would appear the person in the street has little use for them if none of them are funded by the public themselves.

I guess there are open data projects people pay to use in Australia- there are other tender projects out there however these do not contain political information so are not political transparency projects like mine. I've actually had the least interest in the project with the most work and political transparency goals (tenders) and the project with the least sophistication (parliamentary entitlements) received the most interest thanks to Bronwyn Bishop. I was curious to know if this lack of engagement is typical for political transparency projects so I can make the best decision I can about whether it is right to walk away from transparency projects in favour of doing something else more popular but perhaps lacking political significance.

Rosie Williams BA (Sociology)
________________________________________
 NoFibs.com.au<http://nofibs.com.au> - Open Data Reporter | OpenAus<https://openaus.net.au> - Founder and Developer

________________________________
From: okfn-au <okfn-au-bounces at lists.okfn.org> on behalf of Steven De Costa <steven.decosta at linkdigital.com.au>
Sent: Tuesday, 24 November 2015 8:46 AM
To: Open Knowledge discussion list for Australia.
Subject: Re: [@OKau] How can we fund important Open Source projects?

heya Rosie,

There are lots of people on discuss.okfn.org<http://discuss.okfn.org> who can add to such a discussion. Open Knowledge operates in dozens of countries so it is a bit tough for Paul to answer on behalf of everyone's experience.

The CKAN site is referencing Open Knowledge Services, which is a service group setup to provide project and support for a fee. They recover the cost of wages on funded engagements.

Cheers,
Steven

STEVEN DE COSTA | EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
www.linkdigital.com.au<http://www.linkdigital.com.au/>

[http://www.linkdigital.com.au/email/logo-apn-acp-agp.png]  [https://association.drupal.org/files/Drupal_Association_sup_partner_80.png]  [http://www.linkdigital.com.au/email/ckan_association.jpg]

On 24 November 2015 at 08:21, Rosie Williams <BudgetAus at hotmail.com> wrote:

Thanks,

I apologise in advance if I am asking difficult questions but I have to make decisions about whether or not to continue my own projects which is why I'm interested in this thread, what defines a project as successful and how financial sustainability is achieved- particularly in projects that contribute to transparency given that has been my area of interest to date.

Due to Steven mentioning that he can't afford to fund developers for the product he installs, I assumed CKAN relied on volunteer developers but according to the CKAN site 'A full-time professional development team at the Open Knowledge Foundation maintains CKAN and can provide full support and hosting with SLAs. ' However CKAN code also appears to be free to use so it is interesting to wonder where the money is coming from to build it and whether CKAN owes it's existence to grants or is in some way self-sustaining. I'm having trouble determining such things with the information provided by OKFN as the financials do not go into that kind of detail.

The OKFN financials list a number of sources of income so I guess that together with these donations & consultancy fees, volunteers also contribute to the worth of the projects listed in the annual report though the extent of that contribution does not appear to be measured or collated in the reports.

Paul, you mention earlier in the thread that OKFN projects rely on public use and interest to continue (as opposed to the contribution of volunteer labour). Which data does the OKFN rely on to measure public use and interest and is that publicly available?  With a standard business it is a bit easier because you have customer numbers as one measure of interest but the OKFN does not rely on user pays so I'm curious to know what data forms the basis of the decisions taken.

Rosie Williams BA (Sociology)
________________________________________
 NoFibs.com.au<http://nofibs.com.au> - Open Data Reporter | OpenAus<https://openaus.net.au> - Founder and Developer

________________________________
From: okfn-au <okfn-au-bounces at lists.okfn.org> on behalf of Paul Walsh <paulywalsh at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 12 November 2015 6:18 PM
To: Open Knowledge discussion list for Australia.
Subject: Re: [@OKau] How can we fund important Open Source projects?

Hi Rosie,

I think the question of how open source projects can become self-sustaining is a large area of research and diving in, you’ll find that there is no single answer, as "open source project” is a signifier for a huge range of efforts with diversity in motivation, funding, corporate backing, and so on.

Stats on contribution to any OKI open source projects can be found using GitHub’s APIs for repository activity - all our code is there. Although, I think that your interest is less in “open source projects” and more in “open data projects that use (and build) open source software to achieve social goals”, in which case I’m not sure that will help greatly.

There are around 20 paid staff at OKI, and a range of additional contractors on some projects - usually for development.

"Reliance" on volunteers is something that is hard to measure and reason about. Reliance, as a term, suggests to me that you want to understand if a project lives or dies based on volunteer contribution alone. In general, the answer to that is no.

Best,

Paul

On 12 Nov 2015, at 12:28 AM, Rosie Williams <BudgetAus at hotmail.com> wrote:

Hi and thanks for the comments.

The conclusion I've come to wrt to discussion of the more general question of how important open source projects can become self-sustaining  (OKFN projects among them) is that there's limited scope for that discussion because there doesn't seem to be easily accessible data to inform it.

The OKFN seems to be making ends meet but how that relates to specific projects is unclear.

Having stats on the number of paid staff, even an estimate of the number of volunteers working on each project, the money coming in to fund each project and where it is coming from would be useful and what I would expect to see in an annual report. I also think it would be useful to know who the visitors to each project/site are so evaluations can be made about engagement to learn from what works or does not. Perhaps the reliance on volunteers prohibits expectations of gathering & reporting this kind of data.

I will probably end up blogging about this to have something more comprehensive to pass to the appropriate person.

Rosie Williams BA (Sociology)
________________________________________
 NoFibs.com.au<http://nofibs.com.au/> - Open Data Reporter | OpenAus<https://openaus.net.au/> - Founder and Developer

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